SOURCE: Cloy, John D. “1863-1896: Beginnings and the New Humor.” In Pensive Jester: The Literary Career of W. W. Jacobs, pp. 1-22. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 1996.

In the following essay, Cloy traces the beginning of Jacobs's literary career and discusses Many Cargoes as an example of the New Humor school of the 1890s.

The present neglect into which W. W. Jacobs has fallen contrasts sharply with his enormous popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. At one time only Kipling commanded a higher price for short fiction in The Strand Magazine, one of the most widely read British periodicals of the day, where Arthur Conan Doyle had scored successes with Sherlock Holmes. Jacobs's well known dock-side characters, along with his country ne'er-do-wells, were readily recognized by a large cross-section of the English reading public. The passage in England of W. E. Forster's Education Act...